Former death row inmate yearns to keep freedom

RENO -- Jack Mazzan has been taking long walks, contacting family and old friends. He tries out cell phones, CDs and the Internet -- all firsts after 20 years on Nevada's death row.

Since the January reversal of Mazzan's murder conviction and his May 6 release, he's taking tentative steps in a world he had seen only on a printed page or on a prison television set.

Mazzan could go back to prison if he loses at a retrial scheduled for July. But if he is cleared, he'll walk away after having spent more time at death's door than anyone in this country to successfully appeal a capital murder conviction since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Mazzan, a 53-year-old former hairdresser and Vietnam-era Navy veteran, is at the center of an extraordinary case that began with the 1978 stabbing death of a judge's son.

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The body of 26-year-old Richard Minor Jr. was found in his apartment by his father, then-Reno Justice of the Peace Richard C. Minor. He had been stabbed 15 times.

Mazzan and Minor had been smoking marijuana, snorting cocaine and taping albums at the apartment a few hours before the slaying.

Mazzan said he tried to leave but his car wouldn't start and Minor told him to sleep behind the couch. He awoke to see Minor scuffling with someone he couldn't identify. Minor collapsed and Mazzan heard two people running away.

Mazzan ran, too. Fearing he might be in danger and could be busted for drug use, Mazzan fled to Las Vegas. Police contacted him and he voluntarily returned to Reno. He was charged with murder.

Mazzan was convicted of first-degree murder in 1979 and put on death row in January 1980. His conviction stood until the Supreme Court's Jan. 27 ruling.

It was a bombshell: In reversing Mazzan's conviction, the court criticized prosecutors for not giving the defense information about other suspects -- alleged drug-dealers who hadn't been paid for thousands of dollars worth of drugs supplied to Minor.

"The evidence in the police reports provided support for Mazzan's defense that someone else murdered Minor because of his drug dealing," the ruling said.

Despite the ruling, prosecutors want him sent back to prison.

"This is a guy who's been convicted of murder once and he's been sentenced to death for it twice," Washoe County District Attorney Richard Gammick said. "He was a drug dealer before then. So I'm not quite sure why everybody's so enamored of him."

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Mazzan hopes his scheduled retrial will end with a ruling that he can go home to North Carolina with his mother. He also looks forward to seeing his son, now 29, who was 7 when he last saw him.

Jean Mazzan, 72, who arrived here Tuesday to see her son, shares his hopes.

"He's innocent, and all these years he put in, it's just a crime that it took away the best part of his life," she said. "It's just a waiting game now, but I'm sure the outcome is going to be what it's supposed to be. Justice will be served -- at last."

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